It's a shame, in a way, since it came a few days too early: there's a new library out for the Erlang VM (written in LFE) which makes it much easier to use Python from Erlang (the language from Sweden that's famous for impressing both your mum and your cats).

The library is simply called py. It's a wrapper for ErlPort, providing improved usability for Python-specific code as well as an Erlang process supervision tree for the ErlPort Python server. It has an extensive README that not only does the usual examples with LFE, but gives a full accounting of usage in the more common Prolog-inspired syntax Erlang. The LFE Blog has a new post with code examples as well as a demonstration of the py supervision tree (e.g., killing Python server processes and having them restart automatically) which hasn't actually made it into the README yet -- so get it while it's hot!

This could drastically change the picture for compute-intensive tasks in Erlang, Elixir, LFE, and Joxa. The Erlang VM was never intended to excel at the sort of problems that Python has traditionally focused on... yet it provides the sort of infrastructure that the Python community has been agonizing over for more than a decade. For Pythonistas, this may not be a very big deal ... but for the Erlang and functional programming communities, the LFE py project could be a life-saver for any number of projects which need easy-access to the strengths of Python.

3 comments:

Very nice library, keep up the good work! I made a (somewhat) similar library a few months ago for c and c++ in elixir (https://github.com/Primordus/Cure in case you're interested). Definately going to keep an eye on this project :)

With the official end of life extension of Python 2.7 to 2020 some commercial GIS packages I can't replace have stated they will stay on 2.7 for the foreseeable future. I see ErlPort supports Python 2.5 - 2.7, do you have any plan for LFE py to also support Python 2.7?